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Monolingual and bilingual children's processing of coarticulation cues during spoken word recognition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2020

Félix DESMEULES-TRUDEL Open the ORCID record for Félix DESMEULES-TRUDEL [Opens in a new window] ,
Charlotte MOORE  and
Tania S. ZAMUNER
Félix DESMEULES-TRUDEL*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Ottawa Department of Psychology (Brain and Mind Institute), University of Western Ontario
Charlotte MOORE
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Duke University
Tania S. ZAMUNER
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Ottawa
*
*Corresponding author: Western Interdisciplinary Research Building 5182 University of Western Ontario London, ONN6A 3K7Canada E-mail: fdesmeul@uwo.ca
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Abstract

Bilingual children cope with a significant amount of phonetic variability when processing speech, and must learn to weigh phonetic cues differently depending on the cues’ respective roles in their two languages. For example, vowel nasalization is coarticulatory and contrastive in French, but coarticulatory-only in English. In this study, we extended an investigation of the processing of coarticulation in two- to three-year-old English monolingual children (Zamuner, Moore & Desmeules-Trudel, 2016) to a group of four- to six-year-old English monolingual children and age-matched English–French bilingual children. Using eye tracking, we found that older monolingual children and age-matched bilingual children showed more sensitivity to coarticulation cues than the younger children. Moreover, when comparing the older monolinguals and bilinguals, we found no statistical differences between the two groups. These results offer support for the specification of coarticulation in word representations, and indicate that, in some cases, bilingual children possess language processing skills similar to monolinguals.

Keywords

coarticulation processinglanguage developmentbilingualismeye tracking
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 47 , Issue 6 , November 2020 , pp. 1189 - 1206
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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